Sri Aurobindo and the Logic of the Infinite

About this book, the author, Rod Hemsell says, “Most of these essays were collected in 2003, a few recent ones have been added to this edition in the sections on philosophy and mantra, but obviously the earliest already contain the same basic insights that underlie the more systematic studies that I have done since 2008, after reading Sri Aurobindo for forty years.”

On the cover of the first edition, Georges Van Vrekhem wrote, “Not only are there in the essays which constitute this volume the philosophical landscapes the author has been and continues exploring, there is also the testimony of his practical commitment to the realization of a better world. As Sri Aurobindo wrote, the whirlpool of the present globalisation may well be the disorienting transition to the unity of humanity, necessary for the realization of the next step in evolution. After all, if evolution is a fact, why would it stop at the human species? It is in this perspective that Auroville, the City of Dawn, the most daring utopia of them all, has to be seen, and it is to the working out of this ideal that Rod Hemsell is contributing with his life. This is a thinker who dares to walk on the roads of infinity and find on them his fulfilment.”

Project Proposal – Water Conservation and Resource Development in Auroville

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On the Divine Mother: A Mystery and A Prophecy

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Savitri Immersion Workshop

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Sri Aurobindo and the Logic of the Infinite

Here we get a glimpse of the grave conclusion to which Heidegger was drawn by his analysis of Nietzsche’s philosophy of eternal return of the same and will-to-power. In the last volume of his study, Heidegger writes: The Overman simply leaves the man of traditional values behind, overtakes him, and transfers the justification for all laws and the positing of all values to the empowering of power. An act or accomplishment is valid as such only to the extent that it serves to equip, nurture, and enhance will to power. (Nietzsche, Vol. IV, p. 6)

The catastrophe for the Twentieth Century, in Heidegger’s interpretation, is that the metaphysics of the will-to-power led to the dangerously exclusive assumption of power and validity by “calculative thinking” and “technology,” which threaten humanity’s potential for “the thinking of Being,” which is its essence, at its very roots.

It is important for us to grasp the relevance of these philosophical insights, in the context of our study of the Divine Mother, and to reaffirm that the essence and being of man are indeed threatened today, as never before. And it is by those same powerful and dominant extensions of his being, in the form of communications and production technologies, by which he would establish a lasting and invulnerable world power, that he is likely to be undone. The tragic outcome of his illusion of the proximity of immortality, to be achieved through economic and military global dominance, will inevitably entail a magnitude of death and destruction, over time, from which it is unlikely that the human being will survive in its present form. The theme of “world domination,” discussed at length by Heidegger in his study of Nietzsche, has come to the forefront of our concern again today, with constant daily references in the media to the games of nuclear-arms brinksmanship being played out between nations, to national economies being destroyed and governments collapsing under economic pressures brought on them by the controllers of world-economic power, and to the depletion and pollution of global water resources and food supplies, and destruction of the planet’s ecology, as a result of a globally unsustainable human population growth, leading to famine, disease and revolt. All of these global crises are reported daily along with mundane news, advertising, and entertainment as though they were all equally dispensable bits of information to be deferred to another time.

But are these looming threats to human existence indications of the loss of its “essence,” its Being? In fact, aren’t they perfectly justifiable in terms of the nature of that Being itself, in the terms by which it has been understood by Nietzsche and Heidegger? In Being and Time, Heidegger has offered a detailed discussion of death as a necessary component of man’s Being, as essential as its will-to-power and its tragic spirit: “As the end of Da-sein, death is the ownmost nonrelational, certain, and, as such, indefinite and not to be bypassed possibility of Da-sein. As the end of Da-sein, death is in the being of this being-toward-its-end. …The problem of the possible wholeness of the being which we ourselves actually are exists justifiably if care, as the fundamental constitution of Da-sein, “is connected” with death as the most extreme possibility of this being” (Being and Time, p. 239).

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